In the use of multiprocessors and parallel processors, especially during software implementation, it is known that one parameter that needs to be tracked is the MCPS (million cycles per second) estimation and requirement. Computational load is measured in MCPS, and during system and software design, it is helpful to compute MCPS requirements for software blocks. If the chip rate architecture is changed, the resource requirements including MCPS may also change. In a different scenario, in wireless communications, e.g., in wireless networks, the resource and MCPS requirements are dependent, among other things, on the number of antennas and other devices used in the system. If the spread factor for certain users decreases to accommodate higher data rates, the system resource requirements increase. One bottleneck in how many data rate users a system can handle is the symbol rate MCPS requirement. For example, four data users at 64 Kbps (spread factor 16) might require the same amount of symbol rate processing as 32 voice users. Background information on profiling techniques is available in literature. Some profiler information is available in the University of California computer science Technical Report 1996-13, dated May 2, 1996, entitled Design, Implementation, and Analysis of a Split-C Profiler, by Bjoern Haake. Background information about ‘measuring process utilization levels’ may be had from the publication dated Jul. 13, 2004, in Embedded Systems Programming, by Michael J Trader, entitled “How to calculate CPU utilization”.
The basic service set (BSS) IEEE WLAN (wireless local area network) is comprised of an access point (AP) and a plurality of stations. The AP connects its stations with the infrastructure. The basic 802.11 MAC (medium access control) protocol is the DCF (distributed coordination function) that works as a listen-before-talk scheme, based on CSMA (carrier sense multiple access) approach. As known, in WLAN, if two stations detect a channel as being free at the same time, and both have a packet to transmit, a collision occurs, and, this situation is addressed by a collision avoidance (CA) system. As part of a CA system, a station keeps sensing the channel for an additional length of time after detecting the channel as being idle, for a minimum duration called DCF inter-frame space (DIFS). Each station maintains a so called back off count which may be a random number, and a contention window (CW) which are used to determine the number of slot times a station has to wait before transmission. To support time-bound services, the 802.11 standard defines PCF (point coordination function) to let stations have priority access to the wireless medium coordinated by a station called PC (point coordinator). In 802.11, to allow an immediate response, an ACK (acknowledgment) is transmitted following a directed received information packet, after a short inter-frame space (SIFS). In other words, acknowledgements are generated after successfully receiving a directed frame and obtaining channel access using a SIFS, where SIFS<DIFS.
In systems that need the use of computing and processing, measurement of the utilization of the total processor clock cycles for an algorithm or an application has usually been done in the past by computing a total number of idle cycles for the period of observation. It is also possible to observe the PC (program counter) position at regular intervals to compute statistically the utilization of the clock cycles per function. Such approaches sometimes do not enable an efficient use of resources and may not offer sufficient flexibility in the system.